Like an illness divorce is contagious

I just read an unfortunate piece of news, there is a new study from Brown University, Harvard University, and University California, San Diego that found that divorce occurs in clusters between friends.

The study also found that if a friend of a friend is divorced, a person’s odds of getting a divorce increases 33%.

That is really sad to hear in a day and age when we need to do whatever we can to keep families together. It appears in our throw away culture too many of us are willing to not give our relationships all we can to stay together and instead choose to throw them away too easily.

Perhaps when one see’s that it is not the end of the world when a friend gets divorced and moves on and that gives them the courage to divorce their, what I assume was a soulmate when they said yes, better half.

There may be one sliver of hope and that is the study found that:

Overall, the results suggest that attending to the health of one’s friends’ marriages may serve to support and enhance the durability of one’s own relationship

We need to be open eyed and aware of all the cons of choosing a person to marry because in the end divorce hurts everyone and especially children in a marriage.

Speaking about children the study found that”

Interestingly, the presence of children does not influence the likelihood of divorce, but each child reduces the susceptibility to being influenced by peers who get divorced.

I went through a divorce and like all other divorces it was not pretty and it did eventually hurt my children in the end.